I seem to remember my aunt having a copy of this book; unfortunately the binding wasn't all that great and the pages fell out over the years. I doubt she has it any more - she moved house a few years back and a lot of her old books went to charity shops. Pity.

I read it when I was younger, and it seemed a very interesting story - and a peculiar one, because it's really not a traditional 'ghost story'.

I mean, it doesn't follow the usual 'haunted house' narrative of floaty shadows and whispers, and a reason for the activity - there's no 'story' there, in the traditional sense. There was no tragedy linked with the house, no message to be passed on, no moral dimension that could be used to explain the haunting.

Instead, the entity described in the Skillen's home comes across as vicious, unpredictable, frighteningly solid and totally implacable. There's no known cause for this 'woman in black' to suddenly be there, or why it does what it does, and - the most frightening part - apparently no way to stop it. The book doesn't read like a story, it reads as an eyewitness account of an event.

I've looked at some of the Belfast Forum threads (seems there's a fair few about Number 91), and while some folk are hinting that it was all just a stunt, it seems to me that the family stood to gain nothing by 'making it up'. As I recall they lost their family home of many years and a great deal else, and had their lives turned upside down by the whole episode.

I think some people still seem quite angry about this book because there's no half-measures. We can't explain it all away as noisy central heating pipes, or reflections of car headlights in a dark room, or a bad dream, the way we might about other tales about 'ghostly activity'. We can't dismiss it by agreeing that something might have happened, but there's a perfectly rational explanation that has nothing to do with the supernatural, if only we'd look for it.

If it really did all happen as stated - physically, repeatedly, often in the middle of the day, often in a room full of different people, over several months - then the world doesn't work the way we think it does, and that's quite terrifying. No wonder many people find it preferable to just dismiss the whole thing as a pack of lies. When the human brain is confronted with a baffling account like this, it's a reasonable defence mechanism to reject it completely. The alternative is far too unsettling to consider.

The fact that there's still so much interest in this wee book, thirty years on, is also interesting. Maybe we're all still looking for closure on what happened that summer in Beechmount Grove. I know I am...

Oh, and although I couldn't get the OpenLibrary link to work either (it seems to be a listing for the publication, rather than a link to actually read the text?), I just checked and LibrariesNI has three copies in their collection.

You have to be a LibrariesNI member (free to join), and log in, search the catalogue (Author: Skillen, J), and submit a request for the book. Or you could probably call in to your local library branch and just ask someone at the desk.

I understand that these are Heritage collection books so they can't be borrowed and taken away, but you can go along and read a copy in a nominated library. It's not a very long book.

I think some fella posted a link to a book review of Number 91 a year or two ago, and he'd done it this way - I haven't tried it myself, but I just checked the LibrariesNI catalogue and they're still listed.

I do not post on BF i do send private messages to those sending ecopies, the reason being i dont want the book circulated. This was a very tramatic time for myself and my family. It is nothing to do with money i do not want my own children to go through what we went through as children and are still going through as adults.